Rainbow Six (urspr publ 1998; utgåvan 1999)

How disappointing... While very thrilling at its best, for the most part the book is a string of anticlimaxes to endless listings of paramilitary logistics at an elite, international counterterrorism team.

Perhaps the only agreeable thing to me was that the main character (which definitely is Popov, not Clark) frequently had his inner thoughts revealed, however predictable they were.

Nothing more to say about this 900-pager, I'm afraid, which says enough in itself. ( )

I read this for the "Military Related" part of my 2019 reading challenge. It was my first Tom Clancy and overall I didn't enjoy it. I found the first 2/3 of the book had too many characters to keep track of and multiple pages of gun details was unnecessary. The final 1/3 was good and I was actually interested in what was going on, but then the ending felt rushed and tied up too conveniently. ( )

mental chocolate only and not a great one at that. ( )

People either love or hate Clancy. I am in the former group. His books border close to hardcore science fiction in that everything he writes on - the plot, every device, the politics, capabilities and motivations, is within the realm of the possible. Just as he anticipated 9/11 (some may argue, inspired) and stealth machines in this book he anticipates (1998) a rise in non-nation sponsored terrorism and the ease in which fringe groups can cause outsize results as well as increased emphasis on special forces units to contain them.

This story focuses on 2 minor characters from the earlier Jack Ryan novels, John Clark and Domingo Chavez. They are working to stand up a new multinational counterterrorism unit with the support of the intel, military, and police forces of many nations. In it's infancy, it must fight an usually large number of seemingly isolated terrorist incidents that test the new unit's skill while an even greater danger lurks in the shadows.

His writing is easy to follow and flows quickly. As a measure, I took almost 2 wks to read Churchill's The River War, clocking in at just under 400 pages. This 900 pg novel took me roughly 3 days - maybe 9-11 hrs.

There are no obvious typos and editing is solid. There seems to be a minor continuity issue: characters seem to switch from Team -1 to Team -2 and back. I didn't follow that up, but it could be made clearer. Is Oso Vega on 1 or 2 and if he's on 2, it doesn't add up to a 10 man team by the initial roster. His team and that of another guy seem to change throughout the story. In any case most people won't notice as these are tertiary characters at best. ( )

I hadn't read a Tom Clancy book in a long time...and I see now that I haven't been missing too much. The story is, as advertised,...a "thriller", but there are simply too many pages! I forced my self to slog through all 895 pages! Lots of miscellaneous characters and tones of over-extended descriptive passages. Overall, it was just "OK". Maybe I'll try another Clancy book, but not for a while! ( )